digital historical research: an ideal case study for networked visualisation...
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Digital Historical Research: An Ideal Case Study for Networked Visualisation Research
Michael Hawkins (University of Sussex / University of Cambridge), Simon Julier (UCL), Robert Iliffe (University of Sussex), Tim Weyrich (UCL), Melissa Terras (UCL), Claire Warwick (UCL)
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Our Thesis
• Historians are a kind of intelligence analyst
• Therefore: – If we can design tools to aid the historical analysis
process, – We can discover underlying principles and best
practices for many other visual analysis tasks as well
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What Do Historians Do?
• A historian seeks plausible explanations for a set of facts
• These explanations links networks of evidence together
• The links are based on informed opinion
• Multiple explanations are always possible
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A Brief History of Newton
• 4 January 1643 - 31 March 1726
• Professor at Cambridge until 1696
• Warden of Royal Mint until 1726
• Wrote intensely about theological issues for much of his life
Godfrey Kneller portrait of Newton, 1689
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The Newton Corpus • Transcribed by the Newton
Project, University of Sussex
• Consists of more than five million words on a range of topics including: – Alchemy – Mathematics – Physics – Theology – Religious history
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Difficulties with Newton
Some of the many; one document has more than 22,000 insertions and deletions
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Structures of Documents
• Documents often “forked”: – Started with bits of one document – Created later revisions using ambiguous cross-linking
symbols
• Documents linked with other activities: – Later theological documents include mathematical
notes on the revision to the Principia – Partial drafts of manuscripts also appear on the back, or
even between the lines, of draft letters to Treasury Officers
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Location of the Documents
• Individuals in the 18th century sifted through material to develop publishable manuscripts
• Large private collections were broken up in the 19th century
• Wide-spread sale of even small fragments across the entire globe in the 20th century
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Dealing with Newton
• Given these difficulties, the corpus cannot be read like a book
• Visual analytics techniques required
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Structure of a Visual Analytics System
From “National Visualization and Analytics Center: Evolving to Meet World Needs”, Richard May, VASW 2010
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External Data Transcribed via XML
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Visualise Different Document Views
Diplomatic text Normalized text
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Visualise Keyword Linkages
“Newton Spectrum”, Henry Florence, Mayooran Nambiarooran, Ahmed El-Abiary, Yosef Dalbah, Dani Abdallah, Shannon D’Souza
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The Missing Link…
From “National Visualization and Analytics Center: Evolving to Meet World Needs”, Richard May, VASW 2010
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The Missing Link…
• Historical research means that the final, high-level arbiter of the quality of the inference is the human
• The system needs to support their mental model of activity
• These include: – Store parallel, competing hypotheses and means to
browse between them – Store the assumptions inherent in creating those
hypotheses – Provide methods to compare and contrast the differing
network structures upon which they are based
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Where Next?
• We are currently actively looking into two areas:
• Sensemaking: – Study of how people orient themselves in new
environments
• Retroduction: – Study of how people develop novel hypotheses from
surprising data
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Summary
• Historical research involves looking for (often tenuous) relationships in mountains of data
• Most relationships have to be established by informed opinion
• Visual analysis tools can be used to help manage and display the information
• However, there are still huge challenges in how such systems interact with the mental models of end users